Jerry Seinfeld

Actor

• Born: April 29, 1954
• Place of Birth: Brooklyn, New York

COMEDIAN

A popular comedian, Seinfeld starred in one of the top situation comedies of the 1990s, which featured a memorable ensemble cast and contributed to the language some instantly familiar catchphrases.

AREA OF ACHIEVEMENT: Entertainment

Early Life

Jerry Seinfeld (SIN-fehld) was born in Brooklyn, New York, on April 29, 1954, to Kálmán, a professional sign maker (and owner of Seinfeld Signs) of Galician Jewish descent, and Betty, a homemaker of Syrian Jewish descent. According to Seinfeld’s older sister Carolyn, the boy had an ordinary childhood growing up in Massapequa on Long Island; yet several early influences would inform his later extraordinary adulthood and career. Seinfeld’s father was a funny man who taught his son to have fun being funny. As his mother recounts, Seinfeld as a boy was so obsessed with watching television that she got rid of the family’s television set. Undaunted, the boy took his passions next door to watch on his neighbor’s set.

Seinfeld attended Eastlake Elementary School and then Massapequa High School. Besides learning most of what he knows, he says, from television and watching comedians such as Jean Shepherd and the comedy team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, the teenage Seinfeld learned to entertain himself by conducting tape-recorded interviews with his parakeet, the only pet he enjoyed. He also learned some valuable communication skills through Scientology, to which he was introduced by a high school auto mechanics teacher. As a high school student who was not popular, he discovered that passing the occasional note in the classroom would get laughs. After volunteering for a time in 1970 on Kibbutz Sa’ar in northern Israel, and after two years as a student at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Oswego, the eighteen-year-old transferred to Queens College, The City University of New York, where he enjoyed the response to his participation in theater productions. There Seinfeld began to get a feel for comedy, and after graduating from Queens College with a double-major degree in communications and in theater in 1976, he began to perform stand-up.

Life’s Work

After graduation, Seinfeld did a set at New York’s comedy club, Catch a Rising Star. As he has related in interviews, his thoughtfully scripted debut was cut short by nerves, which resulted in his merely introducing topics by name—“The beach . . . driving . . . your parents . . .”—and walking offstage. He thought the set was a failure, but the audience responded surprisingly well, thinking his uttered phrases were the act. Seinfeld learned from the experience, using such tension to build his repertoire as he worked the stages of the few comedy venues of the late 1970s in New York. To survive, Seinfeld waited tables and sold costume jewelry on the street and light bulbs as a telemarketer. Seinfeld joked about these gigs later in interviews, telling GQ’s Alan Richman, for example, how hawking jewelry outside Bloomingdale’s from a cart set on wheels for quick escape from the police was “a parents’ dream come true,” or how trying to sell light bulbs over the phone was dubious at best, for few people were sitting at home in the dark waiting for his sales call with the feeling, “I can’t hold out much longer.”

Yet it was his unceasing dedication to performing—for four years, from 1976 to 1980, at Catch a Rising Star, The Improv, and The Comic Strip—late at night, for thirty to fifty dollars a gig, that contributed to the comic’s launch into iconic stardom. In 1980, with twenty-five minutes of material, Seinfeld moved to Los Angeles to make his name as a stand-up comic. He did perform in a recurring role on the sitcom Benson, as Frankie, the messenger boy and wannabe comedian. After three episodes, however, Seinfeld showed up for reading and was met with the news that Frankie had been dropped from the show: There was no script for Frankie. This dismissive brush-off so irritated Seinfeld that he vowed he would not work in situation comedy again, unless he had much greater control.

Seinfeld remembers May 7, 1981, when his breakthrough moment occurred on The Tonight Show. The defining moment came when Seinfeld finished his set, and the esteemed host, Johnny Carson, who made stars of up-and-coming comics with his nod of approval, gave Seinfeld the “OK” sign with a wink and a smile. Feeling he had been “lifted from the pack,” Seinfeld took his stand-up on the road. By 1989, after doing three hundred appearances a year, he was becoming prosperous and earning recognition. Impressed with his work, representatives for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and Castle Rock Entertainment approached Seinfeld to do a television special. Brainstorming with fellow stand-up and close friend Larry David, he decided the theme for the special would be to answer the commonly asked question, “Where do you get your material?” Seinfeld and David sketch a show featuring a comic and how he gets that material—hanging out with friends. The pair’s pitch was so well received, NBC offered Seinfeld a series based on the same concept. Thus, a spot about a comic and his friends hanging out turned into “the show about nothing,” for nine seasons and 180 episodes. It was a cultural phenomenon. The show stopped taping in 1998, but continued to play in reruns for decades. In 1998, Guinness World Records said Seinfeld was the television actor with the highest annual earnings at $267 million. He and the show collected a slew of awards and nominations, including Screen Actors Guild Awards for outstanding performance by an ensemble in a comedy series (1995, 1997, 1998), Producers Guild of America Award for most promising producer in television (1994, shared with Larry David), Golden Globe Award for best performance by an actor in a television series (1994), Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding comedy series (1993), and American Comedy Award for funniest male performer in a television series (1992, 1993).

Following the end of his show, Seinfeld returned to his first love, stand-up comedy, and embarked on several tours. In 2007, the animated feature that he wrote, starred in, and produced, Bee Movie, was released to lukewarm reviews. In 2010, he was featured on one season of the reality show The Marriage Ref, where comedians commented on the marriage problems of contestants. From 2016 to 2019, he hosted his own web series, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, in which he and a selected comedian drive for coffee and talk. He then wrote, produced, and starred in the Netflix comedy special Jerry Seinfeld: 23 Hours to Kill (2020). He wrote and produced Unfrosted, a 2024 Netflix film about the creation of the Pop-Tart toaster pastry. Seinfeld also starred in and directed the latter.

Significance

Seinfeld was voted by TV Guide as “the best show of all time” and voted by Esquire as “the best situation comedy of all time” with its star “the best comic of all time.” It was powered by Seinfeld’s conversational, ironic, and satiric humor, and it juxtaposed valued friendships against a malfunctioning society. While it may have turned the lens on some narcissistic Manhattanites, Seinfeld also offered a thinly veiled glimpse at Jewishness. Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum called the show “unabashedly Jewish,” and other critics commented on the show’s depiction of urban alienation, which once informed the Jewish immigrant experience. With the elements of surprise, exaggeration, irony, self-effacement, and self-mockery in its characterizations, the show was a perfect reflection of Jewish humor, and it transcended the mainstream situation comedy genre.

Seinfeld is also respected for his standup chops. He received the American Comedy Award for male comedy club stand-up comic in 1988.

Bibliography

Becker, Hollee Actman. "Jerry Seinfeld and Jessica Seinfeld's Relationship Timeline." People, 8 May 2024, people.com/tv/jerry-seinfeld-jessica-seinfeld-relationship-timeline/. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

"Jerry Seinfeld." IMDb, 2024, www.imdb.com/name/nm0000632/?ref‗=fn‗al‗nm‗1. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

Johnson, Carla. “Luckless in New York: The Schlemiel and the Schlimazel in Seinfeld.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 22, no. 3 (Fall, 1994): 116. Print.

McConnell, Frank. “Seinfeld.” Commonweal 123, no. 3 (1996): 19. Print.

Rovi. "Jerry Seinfeld." New York Times. New York Times, 2010. Web. 28 Mar. 2016.

Tracy, Kathleen. Jerry Seinfeld: The Entire Domain. New York: Birch Lane Press, 1998. Print.